Archives

In our study is a chest of drawers, and into this chest, for the past 46 years, I've been putting any piece of paper of sentimental or archival interest, including many photos. Some of these were inherited from my parents' archives.

This week I decided that, on the grounds that I may possibly not live for ever, I should investigate these papers and sort them, hopefully thinning them out a bit.

Some of the photos were really quite old, such as this one of my paternal grandparents, who were born in the early/mid 1880s. I never knew this grandfather and, sadly, this grandmother lived in the south of England from when I was five and then she developed dementia in her seventies, when I was in my teens. But we hardly saw her anyway; the south of England was a long way away in those days before motorways.

They were quite a handsome pair, I think. I'm sorry not to have known him and hardly to have known her.

I did know my other grandparents very well. I don't think I ever realised that my grandfather's will was in that drawer, with this letter to my father (his son-in-law) on the back. How quaint that he signs himself, "I remain yours sincerely Grandpa Campbell" - a mixture of the formal and sort-of-informal. My dad would never have called Grandpa by his first name and Grandpa clearly felt he couldn't sign himself Tom while writing to Dad - even in a letter to be read after Grandpa's death. 

We never called our parents-in-law by their first names either. It was always Mr or Mrs, though it became easier by the time we could just use Granny and Grandpa.

The note on this envelope was written by my other grandfather. "Mother" is his mother. I wonder if he now occupies the "one more" space.

You know how you always think your passport photo is awful, till you have to renew it and you look ten years more awful and think the old one wasn't so bad? Here I am in my 1996 passport, aged 46. I wasn't impressed at the time, but I would settle for this now... I had eyebrows then! And much more hair. Alas.

It's all very interesting - lots of photos of our lovely offspring, cards they wrote to us, cards they made for us, their school reports, various birth, marriage and death certificates of ancestors... It does tend to make me a bit mournful, though. Tempus doesn't half fugit.

Anyway, today Mr L helped Big Grandson to make up the Lego bus he got for Christmas. It took hours. Good old Grandpa. Not quite sure how his knees were afterwards.

So far, the bed in the opposite room has six separate piles on it: photos, general family archives, my own personal archives and three piles of the children's stuff. All of these need to be further sorted and annotated and then archived in some more sensible way. Some things - but sadly not many - are in the waste paper basket. I suppose it's not surprising that 46 years of treasures take more than a weekend to sift through. And there are other more minor repositories elsewhere in the house.

Back I go to the chest of drawers.

A walk in the city

There's still a holidayish, between-lives feeling to things, even for us whose whole lives, potentially, are holidays. Yesterday we took ourselves for a walk in the New Town (as we still call it, though it was begun in 1760), just down from the main shopping streets. I always try to imagine what it was like before there were cars. It must have been stunningly beautiful. Though I suppose there would have been carriages and lots of horse droppings around the place.

The ground slopes down towards the sea, with views over to the other side.

Here's a lane down to Stockbridge. Edinburgh's a hilly place.

The streets are wide and there's little traffic. Mr L was slightly anxious about my standing in the middle of the road. However, nothing came along.

Behind the houses built for the rich there are mews, originally stabling for the horses and rooms for the servants who looked after them. Now these are houses, offices and garages. I love the way that people make tiny gardens by lifting occasional paving slabs. You wouldn't think this was a ten-minute (uphill) walk from the main street of a capital city.

There's that chap again; the one I'm stalking.

There are lots of private gardens in the middle of crescents and squares, such as this one.

You can get a key only if you live in the adjacent street. As can your dog.

And then we walked, puffing somewhat, back up to Princes Street. On the way, we looked into Queen Street Gardens - again, for resident keyholders only (and their dogs).

Raise your eyes and you get a carless view of the Georgian architecture. Once this sandstone was golden, though it's dirtied down over the years.

We tend to take living in Edinburgh for granted. But for a city, it's a lovely place.

Hogmanay

Our wedding anniversary was on the 27th (that was a fast 46 years; oh dear) and we took ourselves to the Botanics. For the first time ever, we got the cafe to ourselves. Where was everyone else?

The weather was dull, but perfectly pleasant. I love the Botanics in any weather.

Then the Edinburgh family came home from Son-in-Law's family down south. We collected them at the station. Edinburgh certainly has a lot of lights at this time of year.

The next day we gave the children their presents. Here's Big Grandson poring over a book about buses.

Yesterday, I took them to the local trampoline centre. They bounced.

Biggest Granddaughter also did this death-defying trapeze thing. She's very brave and also tries hard to do gymnastics, despite (I fear) not being blessed with the right genes.

Big Grandson watched. (He has the family cautious genes.) "I'm certainly not going to do that," he said. Wisely. 

I'm between quilts at the moment - I'm about to do one for a friend and she's coming down soon to discuss fabrics - so have been fiddling around during these quiet days, using up odd scraps of fabric. So thrifty: it's not as if I have a (small) cupboardful of unused material or anything... . But it's fun - not sure where I'm going with it yet.

My heart goes out to all my Australian bloggy friends - how terrible and terrifying these fires are! I hope you and yours are all safe.

And best wishes to all for 2020. The world needs to pull its socks up, I feel. Let's hope for better things soon.

(And while you're at it, world, please stop saying "Auld Lang Zyne". It's "ssyne"-  with an s-. It's just a variation of  "since". Not "zince". This is beginning to drive me sliiiiiightly mad.)

Idle days

With the family away, we've been for walks and watched an unusual amount of television. It's been perfectly pleasant, if somewhat odd. On Christmas Eve, we walked to the art gallery and then back along the river.

It was windless, mild and overcast; good weather for walking.

On Christmas Day, we opened our presents - look, lots of nice books, fabric, chocolate and hyacinths. What more could anyone want?

Then we walked along the sea front at Cramond.

It was an absolutely lovely day: again, mild, not a breath of wind and now with that beautiful, slanting winter sunshine.

The only thing wrong with the foreshore at Cramond is that it's ideal big-dog-walking territory. I quite like dogs but there are so many of them here and they gallop. Lots of people have two or three massive hounds each. Our Edinburgh grandchildren are a bit scared of dogs so we hardly ever bring them here, which is a shame.

This is Cramond Island, which you can walk out to when the tide is low. You need to consult the tide tables, though, since the walkway is covered when the tide comes in. We just looked at it.

And then we walked back, went home and started watching "The Crown", which I've avoided up till now. I disapprove of making films about living people, especially people like the royals, who can't protest. (Or maybe they could if they really wanted to; I don't know. Maybe it's worse to make films about ordinary living people to whom something extraordinary and bad has happened.) It's not that I'm particularly a royalist, but they're just people and I don't think it's fair. I wonder if they watch it. If so, it must be terribly annoying to see themselves misportrayed, as they must be at least to some extent.

However, my curiosity got the better of my judgement,. It's well done but with a strong element of piffle, I thought. Still, their lives have certainly been eventful - for people who don't really do anything. Possibly it's because they have so much leisure that they have time to get themselves into pickles.

Our lives wouldn't make much of a television series. Thankfully.

And all of our children phoned us up via Skype or whatever, so we weren't forgotten.

Ever-rolling tide

Well, Daughter and Littlest Granddaughter came, we had a lovely time and now they've gone again. Littlest spent a lot of time practising with scissors.

 She also enjoyed playing with our 37-year-old Fisher Price till.

She and I went to the museum, where she unearthed some bones.

She looked over at this. "What dat, Nganny?"
I considered my answer. "Well... ."
"It a dinosaur, Nganny." (Don't you know anything?.)

On Sunday, the other grandchildren came over/down and they played together.

Here are all the girls in the spare bedroom. Biggest Granddaughter inducted Medium into the joys of dressing up as Batgirl and Supergirl.

We went to the playpark.

Five little ducks on swings!

And then they all went away and, probably foolishly, we watched a video of when we were young and the children were small. Who on earth is that slim young woman with thick dark hair?? Hmm, and I thought I was fat then. Hah! Here I am, holding my darling baby son, who now lives half way up a hill in Angus with his wife, daughter and his own darling baby son.

And here are our girls, now living hundreds of miles apart.

Just as well I didn't know at the time that this would be the case.

Of course we all grow up and grow old. It would be so nice if we didn't, though.... Let's just keep everyone just as they are. Would that work?

So it's just Mr L and me. It'll be a peaceful day tomorrow. Happy Christmas, all.

Season of lights

Well, the house is decorated and the presents are bought. Not wrapped, I admit, but there has to be something left to do. Would you like to see our pretty lights? There's a tree outside the door - well, not actually a tree. It's a bamboo plant support but it holds lights.

Then as you come into the house, you see the lights round the arch between the front and back halls.

They take only a few minutes to put up, unlike a tree, and give good value.

Then you proceed into the back hall and

 then into the sitting room.

And there's the labour-intensive tree, overloaded with elderly decorations and soon to be demolished, I imagine, by our peachy Littlest Granddaughter, who arrives on Thursday. I can't wait!

Christmas contemplations

Why is it that I'm not any more organised for Christmas than I was when I was working and unbelievably busy?

We have at least brought the Christmas quilt out, my very first one, made six years ago. It's very simple (I was doubtful of my abilities) and it wouldn't pass my quality control nowadays. Some of those corners...

And the cakes were made some time ago; three of the four have been decorated and two delivered. And I've written the cards and posted the overseas ones in time and the tree is up and partly decorated and some other things are festively adorning the rest of the house. Tomorrow all the decorations will be up and serious attention will be paid to the gift situation. But it's getting dangerously late!

This sort of thing has been happening. Big Grandson wasn't very well, hence his wee white face. Also, he wasn't very impressed at being a donkey, with no lines.

Big Granddaughter was a Wise Woman.  It's the 21st century, after all. She had a line, which she delivered with clarity and aplomb, though she had a little weep from stage fright afterwards.

It's odd being so old - though I hope to get older, at which point I shall look back and marvel at my comparative youth now. But a girl who was in my class at school has just died after suffering from dementia for many years - the second in that class to have died from dementia. Both developed it in their early to mid fifties. Both were clever girls and very nice people. Then there's my good friend Dorothy, also from that class, who was killed at 23 by a car that mounted the pavement. Because of the school that we went to, most of the class were together from the ages of 5 till we were 18, so we were a very close bunch. There's a photo of us all just before we left school, all shiny and full of plans. Quite a few of these came to fruition, but there have been tragedies too - at least one whose child died of cot death, one whose sons both died of cancer last year, one who died herself of cancer a few years ago - and I'm sure lots of the disappointments that life deals out to everyone. But also many joys. It does make one a bit thoughtful, though.

I'm very grateful to be comparatively healthy and shall now prove this by going out into the cold and dark, to push cards through the letter boxes of various neighbours.

And I am, like everyone I know, horrified at the results of our recent election. Clearly someone must have voted for Boris Johnson, so I suppose they must be happy. But I can't imagine who they are.

I maybe be back before Christmas, but in any case, season's greetings to my bloggy friends and silent readers.